


Just Hold Me Close

by Chokopoppo



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, M/M, Songfic, multishipping challenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3376394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chokopoppo/pseuds/Chokopoppo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of reincarnation romance AUs, set within the writing constraints of the Songfic Challenge from the early 2000s.</p><p>Sex is not described, but is mentioned in occasionally less-than-vague terms. You have been warned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bartimaeus and Ptolemy

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I don't know if anyone remembers the ten song fanfiction challenge except me, but I decided to do it for every ship within the Four Mains of the Bartimaeus Trilogy and it was super fun. 
> 
> Basically you set your iPod / music player / whatever to shuffle and write ten fanfics based on the first ten songs that come up, and you have to do it in order while the song is playing with no prep time. You have until the song ends to finish, so you actually just get a bunch of unfinished short bits, but whatEVER. Anyway. I ended up cheating a little on the Bartimaeus x Ptolemy one, because I love them so much, and I went to twenty songs instead of ten, but the same basic principal remains. Fight me.

**1\. Treat Me Right - Pat Benetar**

Abandonment was a perfectly normal concept for Bartimaeus. Magicians used you, abused you, jerked you around and generally treated you like a disposable object. There was nothing wrong with leaving your master to die if you could.

Not with Ptolemy.

The boy refused to be Bartimaeus’s master, in a way. It was almost painfully subversive, in that impeccably calm and beautiful manner he held. He abandoned nothing.

**2\. Whereabouts Unknown - Rise Against**

Ashes in the Nile.

It came down to flowing water and time old currents and fire. There was no preservation of the boy’s body. He was given to the fire and the water and the wind, sunken into the mud of the riverbank. In that manner, Bartimaeus could place him perfectly. He’d watched the billowing gray clouds of his friend given to the plane he belonged on - felt the wind that scattered him, fought the water that carried him, sunk into his earth, and never once known where the boy had gone.

Ptolemy would never have settled to the bottom of the river. He belonged in the smell of parchment and the dust that billowed up when the library burned and never, desperately, with Bartimaeus again.

**3\. I’m Not Crying - Flight of the Conchords**

Every once in a while, they staged fake, dramatic breakups for the sake of fucking with Nathaniel. It worked like a charm on each account. The boy incessantly called Ptolemy to check if he was okay, just making sure, you know you’re totally in the right everything’s going to be okay dude it’s going to be fine, and sent Bartimaeus “anonymous” threatening e-mails talking about getting on his knees and begging Ptolemy to take him back BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL HE DESERVED, and the two of them would compare the two over plates of microwave lasagna and laugh a bit.

College kids got so worked up over adults in their relationships. There was something painfully cute about it. Like a puppy that keeps going to get the stick only to find a window in the way, or a cat that discovers that yes, sometimes the kitty door IS closed. But he tried so hard.

They left him a plate.

**4\. No One Mourns The Wicked - Wicked**

After all they had suffered, there was supposed to be another chance. Bartimaeus was sure of it. Normally, he wasn’t sure of much except the wiseness of being alive (a very useful tactic), but he was pretty fucking sure Ptolemy was supposed to come out of the gate, if not still young, at least famous. Protected. Protectable.

Instead, he was as small as ever, skin leathery, hair withered, eyes still sparkling with fourteen years of age behind them. He shook when he walked. He moved slower, breathed slower, spoke slower. Coughed. Leaned on Bartimaeus in a near-constant state. When no one was watching, he allowed himself to be carried - and he weighed less than a sparrow, surely, bones doubtlessly hollow even as they pressed against skin like wet cloth on flesh.

His smile was sunken with tiredness, like the rest of him, and rare. Bartimaeus desperately wanted to press the real one into it’s place, give him back what he was, what he DESERVED. There was no justice in eyes that bright sinking so far.

But he waved a hand.

**5\. If You’re Into It - Flight of the Conchords**

Bartimaeus was willing to do anything for the boy. He would die for him. KILL for him.

"Can you make dinner tonight?"

Okay, Bartimaeus would do anything but THAT. The point was to help the kid, not to kill him via personal incompetence. There was very little Bartimaeus wasn’t fantastic at. Driving was one. Cooking was the other.

**6\. Frail Thing - Northern Lights**

Bartimaeus knew how to survive. Somehow, he couldn’t press that information into his best friend.

Ptolemy knew how to ache with love. Somehow, he couldn’t show the spirit that, with a thousand touches.

But they both knew how to hold hands, and how to watch the stars, and to light candles and read aloud and joke, laugh, cry, kiss cheeks and tell stories, brushing hair out of one another’s eyes and smiling, soft.

**7\. Wait - Sarah McLachlan**

He wore the boy’s face for two thousand, one hundred, twenty nine years. He kept him close.

When the nights grew their blackest and the hopelessness it’s strongest, he would stare down at himself, close his eyes, and hold Ptolemy’s hand. It was all he had. It was safety in oncoming storms.

Two thousand, one hundred, twenty nine years.

He had survived, the boy had not. Survivor’s guilt didn’t exist to him - it only made sense. He had no intentions of running into certain death in stupid backwards fashion. He kept Ptolemy alive, instead.

Just because he had failed once didn’t mean he always had to.

**8\. Dandelion - Audioslave**

Ptolemy always thought Bartimaeus looked the most beautiful when his form slipped up. Eyes went yellow and catlike by accident, or he scratched his beak with a wing as a bird, or something equally backwards. Blue tailfeathers on a crow, deep manly voice in a woman’s form, something like that.

He was fascinating to watch, to listen to. No one spoke like Bartimaeus did, vivid and open and half-mad with derisive wit, ready to knock Ptolemy over with laughter about the Spartans. He moved with every form, gesturing wildly when he got really involved. The half-baked sarcasm routine was always excellent, but nothing was as beautiful as an emphatic spirit with eyes sparkling and face open in genuine expression.

No other spirit opened up like Bartimaeus did, and none of them could possibly be as beautiful as him.

**9\. I Need A Lover - Pat Benetar**

They watched stupid television shows together. Cop shows with stereotypical characters, reruns of whatever, sat and ate Pad Thai and riffed at infomercials.

Ptolemy sort of figured out why he liked the guy after a while. He wasn’t particularly handsome, or rich, and they weren’t exactly soulmates interest-wise - but Bart was ready to kick painted toenails up on a coffee table and kiss some random part of him, and to laugh. No insecurity about humor between friends.

Also, no obsessive phone messages. Always a plus.

**10\. Open - Regina Spektor**

They went to see the pictures sometimes. It was dark in the back rows, dark enough to sit close enough to breathe into each other’s mouths, three rows back from anyone they knew. It was far enough and close enough, to hide and to touch.

Sometimes when it snowed, they took the trains out too many stations away from home, went somewhere else. Held hands. Escaped before fists turned to them. Ate lunch, sat on the same side of the booth. Fell asleep on each other on the way home.

Bartimaeus and Ptolemy.

**11\. For Now - Avenue Q**

Neither of them really knew what they were doing with their lives. It was perfect.

Bartimaeus, really, should’ve known by the time he was thirty. Leaving his life choices as a shrug until he was thirty five was pretty immature. Ptolemy had about four years until you could really peg him for a bum - as it was, he was doing quite well for a student.

They shared a room. They paid taxes. They shared wine. Sometimes, they fucked on the couch. But really, if it was their couch, Bart insisted that no one should be allowed to tell them what to do on it. The neighbors disagreed.

**12\. Ice Cream - Sarah McLachlan**

When the winds grew strong and the rain thick, Ptolemy would crowd himself into his room and watch the sand billowing up over Alexandria between theories.

Bartimaeus obsessively played with his hair and kissed at his temple and neck during this period. He said Ptolemy shouldn’t complain, seeing as how it was keeping him from grumbling himself.

Ptolemy wouldn’t have complained, anyway.

**13\. Looks Like Mona Lisa - Michelle Shocked**

Every painting of Ptolemy he ever saw was ridiculously inaccurate. Stoic-faced, hard-eyed, whiter than the day was long. It was like no one had ever actually seen him. Possibly true, but not likely. None of them had that open, loose face, the sparkling eyes, the chewed brown lip.

Maybe they couldn’t capture something like that. Bartimaeus knew he couldn’t, and he’d been trying for over two thousand years. He tended to cut artists some slack. Not much.

**14\. Hey It’s Pomplemoose - Pomplemoose**

Ptolemy couldn’t dance. He knew it, Bart knew it, everyone who had met him knew it - if they’d ever seen him drunk. He tended to avoid the practice show without at least half a bottle of wine in him.

Bartimaeus gave him points for effort.

**15\. Keepin’ Up With The Kids - Mindless Self Indulgence**

They had absolutely the silliest sex. It was ridiculous, in a fantastic kind of way. Being kissed on the elbow somehow didn’t negate orgasm, and Bart actually seemed to get off on being called “Great Zod, High Lord of Winglewongle”.

**16\. Small Town Moon - Regina Spektor**

Bartimaeus watched the stars sometimes.

The were different from the ones Ptolemy knew.

The moon, however, stayed the same. Silver shone down on brown skin and hair so dark the light made it sparkle. And besides, the stars were the same ones. They were just in different places. The universe was so large, and there was so much in it.

Ptolemy had to be there, somewhere.

**17\. For Good - Wicked**

Sometimes, Ptolemy grew hopeless of making progress in his research. He scattered quills across the floor and kicked things to bruise his toes and dragged fingernails over his face in a fit of self-hatred.

Bartimaeus couldn’t hope to understand how the boy could hate himself, but he learned how to handle it, in a way. Just to sit in Ptolemy’s presence, and be there, not talking or watching or touching, just letting the child shake in his own skin and flop against blankets with tears gleaming into cloth somewhere. In a few hours, he would take his friend’s hand and lean against him.

At that point it was alright for Bartimaeus to kiss him, soft and safe, and to let him burrow into his faux warmth.

**18\. Shadows of the Night - Pat Benetar**

When everything ended, they sank into each other. It was all there was left to do. Hands shaking, weeping into locked lips, embracing the flesh of shadows they had chased through time and love.

There were no words for it. It was past joy, past sorrow, past terror or comfort or sweet melodies twisting through arid desert nights. It was just two of them, beyond the reaches of anything real, anything celestial, ethereal.

**19\. Black Betty - Spiderbait**

Bartimaeus watched troops march back and forth between Persia and Sparta, in Greece, in Rome. He had seen Old Zimbabwe and watched it degrade, brick by brick, until it was overrun entirely. He had been caught in the hellstorms of black powder, listened to the screaming sound shatter of the Black Betty, and the desperate, drowning cries from the pits of mud and hell as mustard gas descended upon boys and men alike.

He survived smoke and fire and floods and cattle. Never did he suffer a wound deeper than Ptolemy’s hand.

**20\. Vie En Rose - Pomplemoose cover (originally Edith Piaf)**

French was the stupidest fucking language in all of Earth’s history, Bartimaeus decided. It didn’t matter - Ptolemy still received every fucking Edith Piaf song with wide eyed adoration for her voice, played every record nine billion fucking times. If he hadn’t been so cute trying to waltz with himself in the kitchen after three martinis, Bartimaeus would have burned every vinyl.


	2. Kitty and Ptolemy

**1\. Ride Across The River - Dire Straits**

He was born in sand and wind, to mud and reeds, born to hold out a hand over a golden expanse.

She was born downtown, on the outskirts of London, born to work in a shop and play her role and do nothing new with her life.

Neither of them rose to their calling. They punched their own fate out through the stars, and caught hold of one another’s hands, and waited for the one who never meant to love either of them. To get to the afterlife, you must pay the ferryman, must be ready to step into his boat and ride across the river. Instead, they chose to wait, and, hands folding over one another’s, they waited together.

You don’t wait with someone for four thousand years, holding their hand and waiting, and not ache to kiss them. He had waited alone, and she kicked through the void and laid fingers against his neck and let him touch something besides rock and air.

**2\. My Favorite Things - Pomplemoose (Cover - Original from The Sound Of Music)**

He is everything, and she loves all of it.

He is dark curly hair and eyes that sparkle like the stars he knows all the names to, he is the words that flow stammering out of his mouth to accept dinner, he is better at painting his fingernails than she is, he is snow-caked and shivering and red-shining-through-brown nose and laughter, beautiful and uncontrolled and just for her.

**3\. One Short Day - Wicked**

Ptolemy is about twenty-seven when he confesses to Kitty that he has literally never gone to a bar or a strip club in his life. He doesn’t seem particularly excited about visiting either, but she takes his hand and insists that he totally has to go with her, and he shrugs and smiles and lets her take him wherever.

Kitty is about twenty three when she tells Ptolemy she’s never actually watched a musical. She is less compliant than he, but he presses that live theater is really really fascinating.

**4\. I Don’t Understand Anything - Everything But The Girl**

Wherever she goes, she finds him. He chases her through her life, not on purpose, not for her, not always in the solid world, but always, in Italy or Japan or fucking New Zealand or even Glasgow, she looks up from work and finds his face.

He always seems as surprised as she is.

She never talks to him, never approaches him. She knows nothing about him. But he chases her into her dreams, holds her hands, stares into her eyes, offers to carry her across the river if the ferryman never comes back. And in every dream, she shakes her head, and takes his hand, and leads him back along wet rocks and walks back and forth. They are waiting for something, together.

She loves a shadow.

**5\. Don’t Leave Me - Regina Spektor**

Ptolemy doesn’t like the way the cigarettes smell. But he doesn’t like watching her stand alone, either.

He doesn’t know who she is, just some woman across the road from the university. She is tired whenever he sees her. And lonely. And he often finds himself wandering away from his office, stumbling, running, down the stairs, trying to get outside, catch her eye from across the road. Every time, she is gone by the time he gets there.

When he goes to Paris, it rains, just like Audrey Hepburn promised it would, smells just like chestnut trees, like she mentioned.

The woman is there too.

**6\. Yesterday To Tomorrow - Audioslave**

She owns a motorcycle. A fucking motorcycle. Of course she does. Leather jacket, flair jeans, combat boots. Of course she has a motorcycle too. Ptolemy is not entirely sure what he expected.

When walking to his car, the sound of it tends to startle him, her ease inverse of his jumped up nerves. He tries to keep calm. But there is something impossibly heart-racing about the bike.

Eventually, he figures out it’s not about the machine, it’s about white teeth smeared accidentally with coral lipstick, shining eyes, short hair that shines brown in the sun, about how alive the power of it makes her, and about the way, sometimes, he thinks he sees her wink at him. By then, he is aware that there is nothing that is not sharp and beautiful about her.

**7\. Jessica - Regina Spektor**

Kitty brushes hair out of his eyes, kisses him in the light filtering through the blinds. He smiles up at her, tired, so happy she thinks she might die.

She doesn’t have to tell him she loves him. In that moment, they both know.

**8\. Hero of War - Rise Against**

When he appears to the both of them, Bartimaeus is confused. He asks why they didn’t just go.

Ptolemy tells him they had to remember him before they walked into oblivion.

Kitty tells him it’s because he’s a stupid asshole and someone needed to show him the way.

The ferryman never returns to the shore for those who don’t go over initially. They knew that eventually. Bartimaeus yells it into their faces, almost in tears. Kitty shrugs and takes Ptolemy’s hand, and holds the other out to him. “Well. Wouldn’t you rather brag to us than find eternal rest?”

He concedes.

**9\. We Belong - Pat Benetar**

She breaks first, in Paris. She cannot stand to see him everywhere, watch him, find him out of the corner of her eye and in the back of restaurants and blinking into her eyes at night. He is ordering coffee in Venice. She storms forward, grabs his shoulder, points at the register. “I will pay for that,” she starts, “if you will tell me your fucking name already.”

He blinks at her. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Slowly, he smiles, grins, his face breaks under it, and he throws arms around her. “I’ll get you one, too,” he stammers into her ear, “Same deal.”

**10\. Entertainment - Rise Against**

There’s an end to the universe, and a beginning of it. Everything is a cycle, a circle, a stupid masturbatory clusterfuck of everything happening. Water-slicked, misty darkness is the best place to learn that you have a chance to jump ship.

Four souls - another one found wandering, looking for Kitty, dark hair and pale, ashen face, stupid fucking haircut - stare into each other.

“Rhekt, you’d best take care of Nathaniel,” he says, and turns to her.

“Kitty?”

“Ptolemy.”

They hold hands and let the universe wash over them.


	3. Bartimaeus and Nathaniel

**1\. Wide Awake - Audioslave**

Nathaniel knew there was something he was missing, but god forbid he actually know what it was.

Probably, he figured, probably he needed to branch out from just doing criminal portraits at the station. He was probably just tired of drawing bad guys for the police. Maybe he needed to draw out of his own head more, off work.

The canvasses at home carried dark grays and blues, hurricanes, rain, storms, lightning burning into his own retinas with the yellows famous painters used to eat to make themselves happy. In his sketchbook, drawings, over and over again of one face. Dark, shaggy haired, broad-nosed and mischievous of eyes, brows knotted at him. Nathaniel didn’t know where the first drawing of the strange man had come from. A character, maybe.

**2\. Holiday - Vampire Weekend**

Bartimaeus knew better than to destroy himself worrying about those he loved and had lost. Five thousand years of learning to grin through destruction, widespread falling fire and fights - he remembered them all too well, but no point in dropping a smile to that.

He wished he’d taken the boy to the coast once, though. Four thousand years previous, and he still remembered Nathaniel. He watched ships crash on a day far too sunny for the end of the world.

His eyes shone with it.

**3\. Believe Me Now - Electric Light Orchestra**

The afterlife was unattainable alone, Nathaniel decided. He wandered the lonely, black shores alone, hands in pockets, hair brushed away from his face at all opportunities. There was no wind by the river Styx, but there was rushing water.

**4\. Steppin’ Out - Electric Light Orchestra**

It rained. Nathaniel didn’t care. He trudged along the sidewalk, staring into the darkness of the city. Puddles splashed, helped along the drenching of his pant-legs. Something was drawing him - an empty half of him.

He swore he heard someone calling him.

Down by the shore, sand sticking absurdly to him and falling into his boots, he ran, going faster as he could. A figure standing, dark hair, dark clothes, turning towards him. A face too familiar, a face that was never supposed to be real, something inked into paper, fake, silent, stared into him.

Lips moved to mouth his name.

**5\. Bust Your Knee Caps - Pomplemoose**

The end of the world wasn’t terrible, Bartimaeus decided. Just sort of hot and bright and lonely. Also wet. And violent.

He had never thought he’d actually die. There had to be a first time for everything. It made sense - the end always came, one way or another. He hadn’t thought a misfire from a ship would catch him, as far out as he was.

The world was beautiful right before he left it. Nine thousand years, and he never saw it coming. But it was time to go. There were people waiting.

**6\. Defying Gravity - Wicked**

He was the only one who would remember.

That was sort of the perk of being a spirit, returning as something else. Or maybe it was a curse. Bartimaeus never bothered to think about that kind of thing - it would only get you into trouble in the end. He looked at the three faces turned towards him.

“Ptolemy, you and Kitty…you’re tough. You’ll be alright.” He glanced at Nathaniel. “I’m a bit worried about you, though. The world might kick you on the ass.”

He glared back. “Thanks for the confidence, you absolute cock, but I’ll be fine.”

The cycle of the universe was moving towards them, quickly. Bartimaeus knew what was coming. He held a hand out to the palest face. “All the same,” he said, “someone should be there for you.”

Nathaniel took it. “Come find me,” he said, and his mouth shook.

You closed your eyes, and let it hit you.

**7\. Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye - Audioslave**

Bartimaeus found Nathaniel wandering the banks. Alone.

The boy had seen him, reached to him, held him in his arms like he’d never touched another human once in four thousand years. He probably hadn’t.

On the shore of the ocean, he was sure it would go the other way. The boy (couldn’t be older than twenty five, tops) was staring at him in absolute shock, the rain deafening him. Bartimaeus tried to speak to him, but neither of them could hear.

“Nathaniel.”

His mouth moves - maybe asks you a question, maybe says your name, you can’t tell - but he reaches a hand out to touch your face and you hold his wrist. He looks lost.

**8\. You Can Be As Loud as The Hell You Want - Avenue Q**

The great thing about college kids, you decide, is how much they bank on love meaning sex.

Being a human is both fantastic and shitty - you’re not as glorious as you used to be, back when you were, well, YOU, but you can FEEL things. You can feel his breath on your ear when he whispers, rushed, that he’s never seen you before, but he knows you, loves you, has loved you for as long as he’s never known you, seen your face his whole life. You can feel him shake under you, tear at your hair, cut your back open.

And it is glorious.

**9\. Diamond Eyes - Shinedown**

Nathaniel looked everywhere for him, for the ghost of an idea of a man. The face kept showing up, smirking at him, raising an eyebrow like an over-familiar dick, spoke shit to him in dreams too lucid and too frequent to not…to not…

The REALNESS of the figure startled him most of all. It wasn’t vague at first, something that became more defined as time passed, like an idea. Maybe, he thought, maybe the man who had chased through his mind since he was twelve and stupid was some kind of ghost, some haunting of a thing, something more specific than just a figment of a perfect man.

In a fit, he started searching for him. He raced all over England, through Europe, China, America, even checked out Australia once or twice. But dark, glittering eyes remained stubbornly unfound, except when smirking at him in dreams, holding a hand out, something too bright to watch approaching.

Eyes like diamonds, hair like coal, and a smile like a completely captivating asshole.

**10\. Broken City - Audioslave**

Nathaniel found himself in abandoned districts far too often. He found an apartment not too far from the ocean shore, too far north for it to ever be warm enough to go swimming, rainy and gloomy and generally shitty. The broken buildings housed criminals more often than not. Criminal portraits paid better than selling art to people who couldn’t afford it.

Bartimaeus wandered the world for far longer than he ever intended to, stuck around in Egypt, looking for any of the three. Eventually, he settled for the home of the end of the world. It was a sort of sick, melancholic draw for him.

And there the boy was.


	4. Nathaniel and Ptolemy

**1\. No Matter Where You Are**

He likes kids movies.

Ptolemy is okay with this, he thinks. It’s something about the repressed childhood that makes magicians almost obsessively crooning of everything they missed. But he’s not a magician, anymore. He is just a boy.

Nathaniel wants to learn how to dance. He wants to learn how to animate. He wants to take voice lessons, and to go to anatomy classes, and to paint, and to play instruments. He says that it’s nicer, now, to do them - now that no one’s telling him how. He likes being guided, not instructed.

Ptolemy can understand that.

**2\. Such Horrible Things**

It is the burden of remembering, maybe. Nathaniel screams at night, sometimes. Ptolemy takes his hands and holds him and does not ask what hides in the dark recesses of his memory.

Sometimes, Nathaniel goes back to sleep. Sometimes, he tells Ptolemy about things he did in another life, and his hands shake.

“I burned the house down,” he might whisper, “not directly - I mean, it wasn’t arson - but It was my _fault_ ,” and Ptolemy nods and presses his forehead against Nathaniel’s and says nothing. “I was…I ruined everything for Kitty and Bartimaeus - I ruined them - how can they look at me? How can they look at me now with anything but contempt?”

“Kitty does not remember,” Ptolemy says quietly, into the darkness, “and Bartimaeus does not care.”

“I never hurt _you_ ,” he whispers. “I gave you nothing to forgive me for.”

“Even if you had, I would have forgiven you,” Ptolemy says, and smiles against tears.

**3\. The Three Of Us**

Ptolemy has such a _fire_ burning in him, Nathaniel realizes. He’s soft, and sweet, and his smile is lopsided and he drives so carefully and always uses his blinker and snuggles down into oversized cardigans, but underneath this, there is so much power, so much drive, so much…so much _fire_.

Ptolemy burns a path for himself. Nathaniel spent his last life following the burnt paths of thousands before him, pretending he was scorching earth that was already blackened by light. He left one brilliant fire going in the scrub brush for magicians who followed him to marvel at, but it is nothing compared to Ptolemy. Ptolemy found ground that no magician would ever pave and carved it out, and believed fully that he would be followed.

He backs down from nothing. He backs down to no one. He does it with white chalk scouring his nice blue cardigans and ink streaking on his cheek and a tired smile and reeking of coffee, but when Nathaniel looks into his eyes, dark and distant and far away, he is lost in them.

He gives his hand to Ptolemy and lets himself be guided for the first time. It is less safe than he anticipated.

**4\. Go All The Way**

Nathaniel started sneaking into Underwood’s library when he was too young to thoroughly understand what he was reading.

Still, the Apocraphya found a special place in his oversized magician’s jacket. Its pages, barely touched by Underwood’s fingers, became dog-eared and well-worn, even with the many stacks of books Nathaniel pressed his way through.

The words were ancient and naive, but they were so…hopeful, if misplaced. The way they washed over him, in the Greek he had studiously learned so many years ago, felt so…safe. So right. So fitting.

**5\. It’s All The Same**

When Nathaniel first found Ptolemy, he thought he had found Bartimaeus, and felt like he was going to vomit. It seems depressing, but that is the way of the world.

The smile, the laugh, the sweet, unused croon of “no, no, I am Ptolemaeus of Alexandria, my son,” somehow didn’t ease Nathaniel’s distress.

Before him was the boy Bartimaeus had loved beyond measure, beyond word, beyond compare. Before him was the comparison his slave had always made to Nathaniel. And he did not know how he had been found lacking. The boy was…small, and slight, and average.

And so much greater than he was.

**6\. Fooled Around And fell in love**

Ptolemy is listening to music on campus off of a walkman when he meets Nathaniel for the first time. The boy is racing across the quad at absolutely breakneck pace, easel under one arm and swinging bag under the other, sweating bullets and panicking. He stops dead at the bench Ptolemy is sitting comfortably on, spins around desperately, and swears.

Against his better judgement, Ptolemy removes one half of the headphones from his head. “Problem?”

The boy barely reacts. “My ride ditched me,” he spits, “I can’t _believe_ this, this was my _one big chance_ , I can’t even…”

“I don’t have another class today. I’ll drive you. Where are you going?”

Ptolemy wishes, sometimes, that he was less inclined to help the unfortunate. It only ever gets him into trouble - the boy keeps calling him, after that, asking for rides - but he can’t find it in himself to mind after Nathaniel buys him that new encyclopedia he was looking for.

**7\. One Short Day**

Nathaniel never went to Alexandria. He should’ve.

He sits on a bench in front of the Louvre, smoking, considering Paris. He never went to an art museum, either, and he doesn’t know if he wants to try going to one without a meeting attached, without frivolity and politics and socialization being involved. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to survive.

He should’ve gone to Alexandria.

He doesn’t know anything about Ptolemy anymore - he used to think he knew everything there was to know about Ptolemy, from the worn pages of a pamphlet - he was a fool.

**8\. Patient Is The Night**

A small, warm hand wraps fingers between his, and Nathaniel is a child again, heart fluttering, throat sweating.

The dark night is warm around them, the stars are bright above them, and below their legs, the failing car engine idles softly. Beyond them, the fields stretch out endlessly.

Ptolemy rests a head on his shoulder. There is nothing to be said.

**9\. You’re My Best Friend**

Ptolemy cannot dance. This doesn’t stop him from trying after half a bottle of wine.

Nathaniel isn’t sure if this is comforting or embarrassing, but he can’t manage to resist when Ptolemy grabs one of his hands and wraps the other around his waist, or spins himself under Nathaniel’s unresisting arm. All he knows is that, in the dim lighting of a kitchen too small to dance in, Ptolemy’s clumsy swinging arms and buzzed giggling feel like a smile blooming up in the barest parts of his stomach.

Ptolemy is pretty light, speaking. Nathaniel doesn’t have much of an issue picking him up and swinging him around. Ptolemy doesn’t have an issue with it, either.

**10\. Death of the First Born**

Ptolemy dreams of the dark, too.

But he is silent when he awakens. Nathaniel never stirs next to him, and Ptolemy does nothing more than to take his hand, and see his sleeping face, and know that the dark is behind them both.


	5. Bartimaeus and Kitty

**1\. Creep - Postmodern Jukebox (Cover)**

The biggest problem, obviously, is that she’s a human. That’s sort of a…big problem. 

The second biggest problem, Bartimaeus thinks, watching the inhumanly old-and-young woman tending to the tomatoes in the front yard, is that Ptolemy was supposed to be the only human he could ever care about. Ptolemy’s special. If this girl is special, that makes Ptolemy…well, _less_ special, doesn’t it?

But something about the way the sunlight catches on that white hair, something about the way her muscles twist and flex like writhing snakes under her skin, the way the spits curses at the the sprouts she cares for so tenderly - it catches him by the innards. She refused a position in the New British Parliament. She didn’t even tell him that Nathaniel’s old assistant had offered her a job until he’d asked her why she’d decided to come live out on the outskirts of town.

She had refused absolute power with absolute modesty, and put herself above humanity.

**2\. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough - Marvin Gaye**

“I hate dancing,” she says coolly when he turns the radio on and offers her a hand.

“Oh, come on,” Bartimaeus says, and smiles smugly at her. “Afraid you’re going to throw your hip out or something?”

She scowls and tucks a hair behind her ear. She’s tried to dye it brown, but there are streaks of white that peek out whenever she pushes it back into a ponytail. “You know, I don’t summon you so you can antagonize me,” she says sourly, “I don’t know why you can’t just can the tomatoes and keep your big mouth shut.”

He sags dramatically. “My spirit was made for greater things,” he says, “for mountains and caves. You’re caging me.”

**3\. Making Good - Wicked**

Every time she looks at him, she remembers London. It swells her heart and embitters her every single time, and she hates it. He reminds her of that familiar fog rising off the Thames - and of the way she’d cried, running from the courthouse, screwed by a system that didn’t care whether she lived or died in the gutter.

But then, that was never his fault.

He’s a scapegoat, just like her. The magicians had tricked her - had tricked everyone she lived near - that the spirits were the reason things were going poorly. They destroyed crops, they tortured people, they burned the humanity out of the humans. Of course, they did _do_ it, but only under the bitter tyranny of their masters. Slaves made of proud beings, crushed lower than the gutters.

And still he smells of the government, of that expensive leather and the clicking of handsome walking sticks. When she watches him, sitting in the windowsill, watching his reflection of Ptolemy stare back at him in the glass, she doesn’t know whether to pity him or not.

**4\. The Dress Song - PigPen Theatre Co.**

China’s not so bad out in the country. Kitty took a while to figure out how to drive her car - she’d never had to drive one back in London - but she does better than Bartimaeus does, which makes her feel very pleased with herself.

He’s okay with just sitting with her, too. When she finds herself laying in the tall grasses, watching with hazy eyes as birds chirp and the clouds pass by, sometimes he comes and lies down by her side. Not close enough to touch her. Just close enough that she knows he’s there.

“I miss Nathaniel,” she says, one warm afternoon. “I know that’s very foolish, since I only knew him for - well, for one day, really. Two, if you get specific. I just wish he hadn’t gone the way he did.”

Bartimaeus grunts noncommittally, but she can tell he feels the same. “All humans die eventually,” he says, his entire attitude feeling like a shrug, “it’s not a big deal when one or the other goes.”

But he takes her hand anyway.

**5\. In My Back - The Tiny**

Bartimaeus is haunted too, of course. He has been haunted since the day he was forced into existence. But he does not speak often of it.

Sometimes, he feels an intense and painful sorrow for what his suggestion of travel to the Other Place has done to her. When he returns there now, he is swarmed with the painful memories of her struggle to create a humanoid form.

Ptolemy had been so elegant in his choices. She had been hardheaded and practical, and had lost control entirely. It could be a euphemism for her entire personality. Nonetheless, Bartimaeus had led her to that. He could never have wished it on anyone - he had told her so himself - and yet she had destroyed her body to save that stupid boy’s life.

He couldn’t even be angry at Nathaniel for it. He himself was the only one to blame.

**6\. Carrying You - Joe Hisaishi**

“Come on, get up,” he says cheerfully, “we’ve got to go pull some water from the well. Come on, then!”

She grunts and curses. “What time is it?”

“Four in the morning, mate,” he says, and laughs as she swears again.

The mornings are cold, but they’re the best time to get water - there’s never any line, unlike the rest of the day. Kitty bundles up bitterly in a jumper, sweatpants, a scarf, a hat, and boots. Bartimaeus meets her at the door, bundled warmly in a big coat and grinning hugely. 

“Are there any other forms you prefer? Besides Ptolemy’s,” she asks him on their long walk. Her hands are freezing, even shoved deep into her pockets.

He shrugs. “Of course, I love the form of any bird,” he says, “I love to fly on the wind. See the sky and the sun.”

Kitty watches the horizon, watches the sunrise peek over the hills.

**7\. Hooked on a Feeling - Blue Swede**

“Oh, _really,_ ” she snaps. “I said _stop_ with the radio already.”

“I don’t care if _you_ dance,” Bartimaeus says gaily, “but I’m bored, and it’s too cold to stay in one place.”

She watches him writhe around in the kitchen like a tendril of smoke going to town. “Don’t you have power over fire or something?” She yells over the music. “Can’t you stay warm some other way?”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t _pain_ you the way making you watch me dance is going to,” he calls back. She frowns, then shrugs and tugs off her jumper.

“Alright, move your ass over,” she says, and storms into the center of the kitchen, “ _this_ is how it’s done.” She only knows one move - the running man - which she can do as long as necessary - but Bartimaeus hoots and hollers so much as she wiggles around awkwardly, that she starts flailing her arms back and forth too.

It’s…nicer than she thought it would be.

**8\. What Good Would The Moon Be - Street Scene**

He ought to steal something for her, he thinks. And then he thinks maybe he’d better actually _buy_ something for her.

Kitty’s never had anything nice in her life. She told him of the small cramped mirror she and her parents had all shared in her childhood, of the broken hairbrush she’d used for two decades regardless because it was too much to buy a new one, and anyway, even broken, it worked just fine. And it doesn’t seem to bother her. And it _shouldn’t_ bother him.

He nicks a thick necklace of diamonds and peridot anyway, and presents it to her the next morning. When she stares at him, wide-eyed and looking for insanity in his eyes, he shrugs. “Everyone deserves something nice now and then,” he says.

**9\. Toe to Toe - Streetlight Manifesto**

Kitty’s gotten kicked in the stomach a lot in her life. Burned and beaten when she was down. But Bartimaeus has never done any of that. Sure, he kidnapped her, but only to protect her from the raving packs of werewolves over London’s rooftops.

She sees his suffering, even if she doesn’t say anything about it. It’s personal to him, just like hers is personal to her.

Sometimes she calls him to lie in bed with her. It’s never an order, but he never refuses. She wraps an arm around his waist and presses her head against his back, listens to the sound of his essence pulsating and flowing through him. He doesn’t have a heartbeat. He doesn’t need one. Somehow, that’s comforting all on its own.

Bartimaeus tells her, practically constantly, that he doesn’t really care what she does with her life - and she thinks that’s probably true, to some extent. He doesn’t care if she moves to Russia or Germany or China or Zaire. But she knows he wants to stay with her - wants to be a part of her life. She wants him there, too, so she can talk with him and lie with him in the night.

They both know this. Neither of them will ever say it.

**10\. What Do You Want Of Me - Man of La Mancha**

They have never pretended to understand one another. Kitty curses Bartimaeus as cynical and yet too hopeful for anyone’s taste, too ridiculous and sentimental, wearing the guise of Ptolemy even after two thousand years. For his own part, Bartimaeus reminds her that she pretends she can improve on a world that will forget her the second she dies, that she’s no magician, no academic, that any work she publishes will be laughed at and ridiculed long after her death.

And yet they both strive, and watch the other strive, and cannot understand why. And they lie together, some times closer than others, try to understand each other, muddlingly meet in the middle.


End file.
